Dynamics CRM Online: what does it look like?

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Posted on 7th February 2010 by Jukka Niiranen in Features

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Like I mentioned in my previous post, cloud-based services are quickly becoming the default mode that people expect a CRM application to be delivered to them. Microsoft is clearly focusing their efforts on responding to this change of environment, but so far the availability of Dynamics CRM Online has been strictly limited to North America. The international launch of the service has been promised to take place in the second half of 2010 (probably together with CRM 5.0 roll-out). Until then, there seems to be little for us Europeans to do, apart from reading CRM Online blog entries from the US colleagues.

I was lucky to recently get access to a CRM Online development environment, provide to us by CoreMotives as a part of our evaluation use of their Marketing Suite. Here are some of my initial impressions on the differences and similarities between Dynamics CRM Online and the good ol’ on-premises Dynamics CRM.

Outlook client setup

Since my work laptop’s Outlook is connected to a production CRM instance, I decided to try the CRM Online with my home PC. The installation file download took a while, but soon we were on our way.

I decided to skip the SQL Server installation to speed things up and settle for the online-only version. After all the patches had been applied, I was greeted with a login window for the Outlook client.

From here onwards everything seemed to work just like in the familiar on-premises CRM world. Perhaps even a bit too closely, as the first prompt that greeted me when accessing CRM Online was a notice about scheduled maintenance downtime later on the same day.

Oh well, I guess the cloud needs some regualr reboots, just like any Windows machine.

CRM Online user inteface

Like with the Outlook client installation, most things look very familiar inside the CRM Online UI. The home page does however present some new features to us.

CRM Online contains a feature called Get Started Panes, which provide contextual information at the top of the main CRM window entity screens. By default these contain categorized instructions on common tasks a user might want to perform when working with e.g. accounts or opportunities.
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Looking ahead at Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5: screenshots from PDC

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Posted on 22nd November 2009 by Jukka Niiranen in News and events

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Back from a long time of inactivity, I decided to resurrect this blog with some content taken from the recent PDC09 sessions. Just like last year, presenting the feature set of the upcoming CRM version wasn’t really the main point in PDC (that’s what Convergence is for), but when someone gives a developer demo using the new platform, there’s always going to be interesting snippets of information also for us non-developers. So, last night I watched the three CRM/xRM related session recordings and took some notes and screenshots from them (which explains the low image quality, sorry about that).

On the technical side, CRM 5 will be running natively on .NET Framework 4.0, which means it will be riding on the wave of the latest .NET version released, unlike CRM 3.0 or 4.0. In the presentations there were talks about WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), .NET RIA Services, system types and all kinds of developer lingo that goes way above my head. There’s a great summary article here by Marco Amoedo.

Now, let’s move on to the CRM application itself.

Basic UI

CRM5_GetStartedWithAccounts_small

We’ve all seen the upcoming ribbon UI in CRM5 already, so that wasn’t big news. Looking at the start page ribbon content, there’s a button called “Add connection”, which hopefully is about the creation of ad-hoc relationships between any entities, but none of that was shown in the session. Another interesting thing was the “Get started with accounts” instructions pane. That might be just a feature of CRM Online, which was used for the demo, but I sure would welcome a better way to provide customized instruction links to users right within the CRM UI.

CRM5_Cases_small

More of the same here under the Service menu. The out-of-the-box views don’t seem to have evolved, but it would be interesting to see what’s behind that Views tab on the top. The order of the Quick Find box and the views dropdown menu was somehow messed in this early version of CRM5.

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